The Economics of American Sports Leagues

Author

Abstract

Player mobility in North American sports leagues is limited by labour market constraints designed ostensibly to allow teams to recoup player development costs and to maintain competitive balance within leagues. Theory holds that the distribution of talent will be invariant under any institutional configuration, and that while rules to constrain movement will serve to enhance monopsonistic exploitation of talent, they will have no effect on competitive balance. This paper reprises a general theory through which the effects of the labour market constraints can be comparatively analysed for American sports leagues. The economics of sports has been relegated to the realm of labour theory by the unnecessarily limiting assumption that owners of sports clubs are single-minded profit maximisers. This paper also presents a theory that seeks to unify capital market decisions of financial leverage and ownership syndication with operational labour market decisions for athletic talent and an owner's desire to win. Copyright 2000 by Scottish Economic Society.

Download full text from publisher

File URL:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/servlet/useragent?func=synergy&synergyAction=showTOC&journalCode=sjpe&volume=47&issue=4&year=2000&part=nullFile Function: link to full textDownload Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

More about this item

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:scotjp:v:47:y:2000:i:4:p:364-98. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.